Stéphane Mosès, thinker of Judaism

The interviews that Stéphane Mosès gave to Victor Malka were published shortly after the disappearance of Mosès, occurred on 1^er December 2007. The volume, ordered in a dozen chronological and thematic chapters, constitutes a kind of biography of an intellectual who was both a witness and an actor of Judaism in France and then in Israel, while giving the floor to the man of letters, books and thoughts that was Mosès.

Man was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, in 1931. His individual trajectory, without being exceptional, is marked by history (see in particular the first chapter, “ From Berlin to Casablanca »). Her family decides to flee the persecution: she left Germany in 1936 and, after a passage by Amsterdam, won Morocco, where Mosès became a brilliant student. He continued his studies in metropolitan France, where he is preparing and succeeded in the competition of the École Normale Supérieure, before undertaking a university career.

It is in these years of Parisian youth that what is undoubtedly the major phenomenon of its existence, at least in the spiritual, philosophical and intellectual dimension, and sums up the title of the volume: the “ Back to Judaism ». We can sketch a parallel, mutatis mutandiswith the famous trajectory of the thinker that Mosès, precisely, contributed so much to make known: Franz Rosenzweig. Like him, Mosès “ discover “Judaism and breaks with the fairly strong assimilation of his family, well representative of this German Judaism that Mosès compares, in a recurring parallel in the book, with Judaism conservative American today. Like him, he proceeds to his own “ rejuctation ” – He also happened to speak, rather than” disassimilation “As some authors do,” sampling To designate this same process envisaged in the more collective dimension of the relation to nations.

The return, one could even say, in the literal sense, the “ conversion “, However, of the admission of Mosès, without the” grace “: This is not an interior conversion,” at the Claudel ». Here we touch the limits of the comparison with the conversion of Rosenzweig, which occurred in a romantic way on the night of October 10, 1913 when he was at the threshold of conversion (in the usual sense of the word, this time: Rosenzweig was going to be Christian). Mosès insists on it: he has “ Never had mystical revelation ». He rationally made the choice of a commitment to Jewish life, including religiosity, lived in moderation and by testifying a real but distant affection for religious orthodoxy that people operate often operating such “ back ».

This return does not take place in secrecy: Mosès is indeed a leading actor in Jewish life. We classically qualify the years of the post-war period as those of the renewal of French Judaism. The three main institutional centers are the School of Strasbourg, directed by André Neher, the École Normale Israelite Eastern (éNio), led by Emmanuel Levinas, and the Gilbert-Bloch d’Orsay school, marked by the culture and history of the “ E. I. (Israelite scouts), and whose first animators were Léon Askénazi (“ Manitou “) And Robert Gamzz (“ Beaver »), Then Henri Atlan. Moreover, Mosès himself led the school later, in the 1960s. In addition, Germanist and associate of German, Mosès began a university career in France, which led him to the University of the Sorbonne and at the University of Nanterre. But, like many others, he was marked by the six-day war and decided to go and live in Israel, where he began to teach and settled in 1969. He taught thirty years at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1968-1998) where he created, in 1977, a department of German studies.

His life was very full, but no more adventurous than that: the essential domain, the most addressed in interviews, is thought. Paradoxically, what attracts Mosès to Judaism is, it seems, what he shares with Western civilization: that there is as a Jewish philosophy, as “ world vision “Judaism is” not unworthy of Western philosophy », This is immediately amazed, in particular in the teaching of Manitou. His research on the field “ Judeo-German »Allow him to introduce a fairly large audience to a number of Jewish thinkers, often difficult to access. In this galaxy of authors who mark their distance with the “ science of Judaism And are part of philosophy while dialoguing with tradition, let us quote Gershom Scholem (which Mosès knew well thanks to Levinas) and Walter Benjamin, but also Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen or even Manès Sperber and Hans Jonas, without forgetting the authors more “ literary »On which Mosès, such as Franz Kafka or Paul Cen worked. But of all, the man to whom the work of Mosès remains the most attached is Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), on which he published a major work in 1982, System and revelationuseful work as the thought and philosophy of Rosenzweig are difficult and require this work as a smuggler that Mosès did.

These points are, as just, mentioned in the central chapters of the volume (chapters 3, 4 and 5: “ Judeo-German thinking “,” Judaism and modernity “,” Franz Rosenzweig »), Interesting but not to be very surprising. The last chapters of the book present, in a perhaps more unexpected and all the more pleasant way, a certain number of points undoubtedly holding Mosès à Coeur-five of the twelve chapters of the book relate to a particular author: if Rosenzweig, Levinas or Scholem are expected (chapters 5, 6 and 9), we expect less, and we read with all the more interest, the pages he devotes to the Maharal of Prague (Chapter 8) and, above all, in Haïm de Volozhyn (chapter 7), the author of The soul of lifewhich develops such a strong and singular vision of man and Judaism.

The limits of this book are those of the genre to which it belongs: one does not find what is not here at stake and that interviews can only hardly highlight, namely a system or a detailed presentation of the thought of Mosès or new readings of Judeo-German thinking ; There are no more reflections on land where, no doubt, Mosès and Malka did not particularly want to go-not much, for example, on Zionism, on French politics or on Israeli intellectual life. There are, on the other hand, scraps of narrative, a testimony, a memory, a personal vision of Judaism, made accessible ; There is still the strong affirmation of someone who has resolved for him difficult questions – Judaism as a possible point of articulation of the universal and the particular, the refusal of the ideology of secularism, the conclusion of a crisis, even a failure of current Judaism (chapter 12) ; All answers, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes not, from which everyone can now continue to reflect.